A New Approach to Optimal Placement of Power Quality Monitors for Voltage Sag Detection
This paper presents a new approach to the optimal placement of power quality monitors (PQMs) for voltage sag detection. Determining the optimal number and arrangement of PQMs is necessary since the installation of monitors at all buses in a network is an uneconomical option. The optimization problem is defined by the concept of topological monitor reach area. A new cost function is defined in order to simultaneously determine the required number of PQMs and their arrangement. Four optimization methods are implemented to solve the problem: Genetic Algorithm, Binary Particle Swarm Optimization, Binary Dragonfly Algorithm and Binary Bat Algorithm. The presented approach is tested on one part of the power distribution network in the capital city of our country. Simulations proved that the Binary Bat Algorithm has the best performance in terms of computational time, convergence and the probability rate of finding the global optimum.